Andries van Dam

Andries van Dam is the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. Professor van Dam was a founder of that department, and its chair for nine years. After introducing computer science to high schools in 1962, in 1968 he helped form the standard ACM university curriculum. He pioneered the electronic classroom, and the use of animation and hypermedia for teaching. His former students are department chairs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, the University of Washington, and the University of Waterloo, as well as leaders in industry. All five of his eligible students have National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigators Awards.

Professor van Dam has held thirty consultancies, authored or co-authored five books and eighty papers and given one-hundred and fifty invited lectures. His graphics text is the standard in the field. He is a founder of ACM SIGGRAPH.

van Dam has been an international leader in the development of undergraduate and graduate curricula in computer graphics, his principal research area. He has fostered innovative teaching methods at Brown not only in computer science, but in the application of computing technology in other disciplines. His personal investment in Brown students - particularly undergraduates - over nearly three decades has yielded an enormous pool of people who have followed in his footsteps as educators, researchers and developers.

Through his research interest in "computer books," van Dam has developed systems that promote the connectivity of ideas and aid in the search for and creation of information. He collaborated with Ted Nelson to produce an early prototype of hypertest to explore ideas of nonsequential reading and writing. A version of his WYSIWYG hypertext editing system was installed in the Brown library more than twenty years ago and was used to each poetry classes in the English Department. His Interactive Graphical Documents system was a very early hypermedia system, combining graphics and animation with text.

van Dam produced generations of students who left Brown genuinely excited both about computer science and about computer science education.